A Reading Of Life--The Test Of Manhood

Like a flood river whirled at rocky banks,An army issues out of wilderness,With battle plucking round its ragged flanks;Obstruction in the van; insane excessOft at the heart; yet hard the onward stressUnto more spacious, where move ordered ranks,And rise hushed temples built of shapely stone,The work of hands not pledged to grind or slay.They gave our earth a dress of flesh on bone;A tongue to speak with answering heaven gave they.Then was the gracious birth of man's new day;Divided from the haunted night it shone.

That quiet dawn was Reverence; whereof sprangEthereal Beauty in full morningtide.Another sun had risen to clasp his bride:It was another earth unto him sang.

Came Reverence from the Huntress on her heights?From the Persuader came it, in those valesWhereunto she melodiously invites,Her troops of eager servitors regales?Not far those two great Powers of Nature speedDisciple steps on earth when sole they lead;Nor either points for us the way of flame.From him predestined mightier it came;His task to hold them both in breast, and yieldTheir dues to each, and of their war be field.

The foes that in repulsion never ceased,Must he, who once has been the goodly beastOf one or other, at whose beck he ran,Constrain to make him serviceable man;Offending neither, nor the natural claimEach pressed, denying, for his true man's name.

Ah, what a sweat of anguish in that strifeTo hold them fast conjoined within him still;Submissive to his willAlong the road of life!And marvel not he wavered if at whilesThe forward step met frowns, the backward smiles.For Pleasure witched him her sweet cup to drain;Repentance offered ecstasy in pain.Delicious licence called it Nature's cry;Ascetic rigours crushed the fleshly sigh;A tread on shingle timed his lame advanceFlung as the die of Bacchanalian Chance,He of the troubled marching army leanedOn godhead visible, on godhead screened;The radiant roseate, the curtained white;Yet sharp his battle strained through day, through night.

He drank of fictions, till celestial aidMight seem accorded when he fawned and prayed;Sagely the generous Giver circumspect,To choose for grants the egregious, his elect;And ever that imagined succour slewThe soul of brotherhood whence Reverence drew.

In fellowship religion has its founts:The solitary his own God reveres:Ascend no sacred MountsOur hungers or our fears.As only for the numbers Nature's careIs shown, and she the personal nothing heeds,So to Divinity the spring of prayerFrom brotherhood the one way upward leads.Like the sustaining airAre both for flowers and weeds.But he who claims in spirit to be flower,Will find them both an air that doth devour.

Whereby he smelt his treason, who imploredExternal gifts bestowed but on the sword;Beheld himself, with less and less disguise,Through those blood-cataracts which dimmed his eyes,His army's foe, condemned to strive and fail;See a black adversary's ghost prevail;Never, though triumphs hailed him, hope to winWhile still the conflict tore his breast within.

Out of that agony, misread for thoseImprisoned Powers warring unappeased,The ghost of his black adversary rose,To smother light, shut heaven, show earth diseased.And long with him was wrestling ere emergedA mind to read in him the reflex shadeOf its fierce torment; this way, that way urged;By craven compromises hourly swayed.

Crouched as a nestling, still its wings untried,The man's mind opened under weight of cloud.To penetrate the dark was it endowed;Stood day before a vision shooting wide.Whereat the spectral enemy lost form;The traversed wilderness exposed its track.He felt the far advance in looking back;Thence trust in his foot forward through the storm.

Under the low-browed tempest's eye of ire,That ere it lightened smote a coward heart,Earth nerved her chastened son to hail athwartAll ventures perilous his shrouded Sire;A stranger still, religiously divined;Not yet with understanding read aright.But when the mind, the cherishable mind,The multitude's grave shepherd, took full flight,Himself as mirror raised among his kind,He saw, and first of brotherhood had sight:Knew that his force to fly, his will to see,His heart enlarged beyond its ribbed domain,Had come of many a grip in mastery,Which held conjoined the hostile rival twain,And of his bosom made him lord, to keepThe starry roof of his unruffled frameAwake to earth, to heaven, and plumb the deepBelow, above, aye with a wistful aim.

The mastering mind in him, by tempests blown,By traitor inmates baited, upward burned;Perforce of growth, the Master mind discerned,The Great Unseen, nowise the Dark Unknown.To whom unwittingly did he aspireIn wilderness, where bitter was his need:To whom in blindness, as an earthy seedFor light and air, he struck through crimson mire.But not ere he upheld a forehead lamp,And viewed an army, once the seeming doomed,All choral in its fruitful garden camp,The spiritual the palpable illumed.

This gift of penetration and embrace,His prize from tidal battles lost or won,Reveals the scheme to animate his race:How that it is a warfare but begun;Unending; with no Power to interpose;No prayer, save for strength to keep his ground,Heard of the Highest; never battle's close,The victory complete and victor crowned:Nor solace in defeat, save from that senseOf strength well spent, which is the strength renewed.In manhood must he find his competence;In his clear mind the spiritual food:God being there while he his fight maintains;Throughout his mind the Master Mind being there,While he rejects the suicide despair;Accepts the spur of explicable pains;Obedient to Nature, not her slave:Her lord, if to her rigid laws he bows;Her dust, if with his conscience he plays knave,And bids the Passions on the Pleasures browse:-Whence Evil in a world unread before;That mystery to simple springs resolved.His God the Known, diviner to adore,Shows Nature's savage riddles kindly solved.Inconscient, insensitive, she reignsIn iron laws, though rapturous fair her face.Back to the primal brute shall he retraceHis path, doth he permit to force her chainsA soft Persuader coursing through his veins,An icy Huntress stringing to the chase:What one the flash disdains;What one so gives it grace.

But is he rightly manful in her eyes,A splendid bloodless knight to gain the skies,A blood-hot son of Earth by all her signs,Desireing and desireable he shines;As peaches, that have caught the sun's upriseAnd kissed warm gold till noonday, even as vines.Earth fills him with her juices, without fearThat she will cast him drunken down the steeps.All woman is she to this man most dear;He sows for bread, and she in spirit reaps:She conscient, she sensitive, in him;With him enwound, his brave ambition hers:By him humaner made; by his keen spursPricked to race past the pride in giant limb,Her crazy adoration of big thews,Proud in her primal sons, when crags they hurled,Were thunder spitting lightnings on the worldIn daily deeds, and she their evening Muse.

This man, this hero, works not to destroy;This godlike--as the rock in ocean stands; -He of the myriad eyes, the myriad handsCreative; in his edifice has joy.How strength may serve for purity is shownWhen he himself can scourge to make it clean.Withal his pitch of pride would not disownA sober world that walks the balanced meanBetween its tempters, rarely overthrown:And such at times his army's march has been.

Near is he to great Nature in the thoughtEach changing Season intimately saith,That nought save apparition knows the death;To the God-lighted mind of man 'tis nought.She counts not loss a word of any weight;It may befal his passions and his greedsTo lose their treasures, like the vein that bleeds,But life gone breathless will she reinstate.

Close on the heart of Earth his bosom beats,When he the mandate lodged in it obeys,Alive to breast a future wrapped in haze,Strike camp, and onward, like the wind's cloud-fleets.Unresting she, unresting he, from changeTo change, as rain of cloud, as fruit of rain;She feels her blood-tree throbbing in her grain,Yet skyward branched, with loftier mark and range.

No miracle the sprout of wheat from clod,She knows, nor growth of man in grisly brute;But he, the flower at head and soil at root,Is miracle, guides he the brute to God.And that way seems he bound; that way the road,With his dark-lantern mind, unled, alone,Wearifully through forest-tracts unsown,He travels, urged by some internal goad.

Dares he behold the thing he is, what thingHe would become is in his mind its child;Astir, demanding birth to light and wing;For battle prompt, by pleasure unbeguiled.So moves he forth in faith, if he has madeHis mind God's temple, dedicate to truth.Earth's nourishing delights, no more gainsaid,He tastes, as doth the bridegroom rich in youth.Then knows he Love, that beckons and controls;The star of sky upon his footway cast;Then match in him who holds his tempters fast,The body's love and mind's, whereof the soul's.Then Earth her man for woman finds at last,To speed the pair unto her goal of goals.

Or is't the widowed's dream of her new mate?Seen has she virulent days of heat in flood;The sly Persuader snaky in his blood;With her the barren Huntress alternate;His rough refractory off on kicking heelsTo rear; the man dragged rearward, shamed, amazed;And as a torrent stream where cattle grazed,His tumbled world. What, then, the faith she feels?May not his aspect, like her own so fairReflexively, the central force belie,And he, the once wild ocean storming sky,Be rebel at the core? What hope is there?

'Tis that in each recovery he preserves,Between his upper and his nether wit,Sense of his march ahead, more brightly lit;He less the shaken thing of lusts and nerves;With such a grasp upon his brute as tellsOf wisdom from that vile relapsing spun.A Sun goes down in wasted fire, a SunResplendent springs, to faith refreshed compels.